William Shatner says we need Trek back on TV, and he’s right

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The last two Star Trek movies have been great, but it’s time to consider putting Starfleet uniforms back on the small screen.

In a recent interview for his upcoming The Captains: Close Up documentary, William Shatner spoke a bit about the recent Star Trek films. In the interview, he applauded J. J. Abrams for figuring out the right mixture of action and science fiction to make Star Trek exciting to as big of an audience as possible, which in and of itself is a big deal. He went on to explain that the stories that made up the many iterations of Star Trek over the years were what made the franchise what it is today, and that there’s still room for a Trek show on television. Looking back at the two Alternate Reality Trek films, he couldn’t be more right.

Star Trek Into Darkness was an incredible ride. There was just the right amount of action, suspense, and a little of the memory lane charm that has worked so well for these two movies so far. Combined with the phenomenal acting on behalf of Benedict Cumberbatch and Zachary Quinto, Into Darkness really did a great job capturing the audience. Unfortunately, once that two-hour-long ride ended there were way more questions than answers. The kind of questions that could only really be answered and explained in a series of novels or, more likely, a television show.

The first Alternate Reality Star Trek movie put a focus on re-introducing the names everyone was familiar with. There needed to be some time spent explaining these new faces and assembling the “classic Trek” crew. With Into Darkness, there was an assumption that you were already familiar with the characters that were relevant to the story, but that didn’t stop them from filling the Enterprise with new faces that never even got names. These are the people that, in a TV show, would get their own episode explaining backstory and giving you a reason to care about them longterm. In a movie format, they might as well all be redshirts.

There’s also the leftover bits from the story, bits that would have either been resolved and explained in separate episodes or spun into their own arcs in a television series. Corruption in Starfleet was a favorite mini arc in past Trek series, historically leading to a violent shake-up that introduced more new faces to give orders from their San Francisco headquarters. There’s also the reaction episodes, where hostile alien races respond to the news that Starfleet has built a ship that causes military unrest across the quadrant. The leftover unresolved issues caused by Into Darkness alone could fill a season, if there were a show to complement these movies.

Ultimately, it is up to Paramount and CBS to spin up a new Trek show if it were to follow the Alternate Reality plot, which seems unlikely at best. Creating a television series with the stars that are in the movies doesn’t seem terribly likely, and doing anything other than that would be a deviation from the Trek that has successfully captured such a significant audience. It’s unclear whether or not other groups could make an unrelated Trek series from a different point in the franchise’s massive timeline without interfering with the current IP, which could cause problems. If it were possible that a new series could exist as a Netflix exclusive, for example, it’d be hard to imagine anything but a positive reaction to a well made addition to the Trek legacy.